News and views about legal academia and the legal profession by Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Dan Filler (Drexel University)

May 22, 2008

U Conn's Paul Berman Named New Dean at Arizona State

The ASU press release is here. Arizona State is one of those historically more regional schools with a very good eye for faculty talent and one that is chronically underranked by U.S. News (others similarly situated--sharp eye for faculty talent and underranked by U.S. News--would include the University of Arizona, Florida State, Chicago-Kent, San Diego, George Mason, and Cardozo, among others). ASU made enormous progress under Berman's predecessor, Patricia White. ASU is probably a school to watch in the coming years.

Two Lateral Hires for Illinois: Hamilton from Chicago-Kent, Thomas from Cincinnati

The University of Illinois College of Law has made two lateral hires with tenure: Daniel Hamilton (legal history, property, constitutional law) from the Chicago-Kent College of Law and Suja Thomas (civil procedure) from the University of Cincinnati.

I'm not sure I quite follow what all the huffing and puffing is about in the "clarification", but I offer the link for readers who want to get Professor Zywicki's account. Professor Zywicki says: "Brian Leiter credulously relied on the Daily Kos post--seriously--in a related post of his to comment on my colleague Stephen Smith and me (Brian, amusingly, appears to be embarrassed in doing so, referring to Daily Kos as 'one of the popular liberal blogs' rather than by name)." The parenthetical is itself amusing! I am no more "embarrassed" by referencing the Daily Kos blog (which is exactly as I described it, namely, "one of the more popular liberal blogs") than I am by referencing the Volokh Conspiracy, which one might call one of the more popular conservative blogs. Both strike me as about equally reliable, Daily Kos more so when it comes to questions of social and economic policy, the Volokh blog with respect to legal matters, but this is, frankly, based on rather limited exposure to them both. Unlike the Volokh blog, however, which is known to a great many law professors, I have no reason to think most law professors have ever heard of Daily Kos or know its politics (maybe I'm wrong).

Here, by the way, is the essay by Stephen Smith (Virginia), which I fear I understand rather too well, but, again, readers can decide for themselves.

The Yale Law Journal Claims to Have Blind Review of Manuscripts...

To be honest, I am not
100% sure when and why
the CV uploading capability was made, but I can tell you the only time
that I
as Editor-in-Chief looked at the CVs was to get contact
information--professors
often provide some contact information in the cover letter, but a few
times
they did not include enough and I checked the CV to see whether they
provided
any information other than what I could find through Google. The
Article & Essay Editors cannot access the CVs through our
submissions system; the only person with capabilities to view it is the
EIC. In any case, I can tell you that we all
have a very strong commitment to the anonymous review process--when we
finally "broke the
seal" after voting to accept a piece and found out who the author was,
there was particular excitement if the author was junior--I would
describe the
committee's reaction to accepting Jill Anderson's piece, for example,
as maniacally
gleeful.

I'd also like to clarify an explanation in the comments on the post [at the link, above], that the first
screening editor often knows the author of the piece. This is true,
but I want to emphasize that it's not our policy--as you can see in the
submissions guidelines, we ask professors to redact any identifying
information. Unfortunately (and understandably, given that professors are
generally submitting to a number of law reviews that don't require anonymity),
professors generally don't do this--so the first editor with their
hands on the piece usually knows the author, but only because the author didn't
redact it. That editor then goes through the piece and rigorously redacts
any identifying information, so at either of the later two stages, the
submission is sent around in completely anonymous form.